I think this has been a bit of a problem for certain guilds. I know mine (and some friends elsewhere) that would set foot in mythic and get however far we can get, if we had the people. But we don’t have enough people/interest. Sure, there are pugs, but mythic pugs can be… unpleasant. For me, not worth the effort.
I would love to see flex mythic, but I think this is the reason we don’t have it. It’s so very specifically tuned.
For really hard heroic fights in the past, this has been the case as well. But I’d rather deal with this and get to try in a flex raid.
I think flex mythic raids would be a great thing. But sadly, I’m not sure how practical it is. I really hope they could find a feasible way to do it.
The problem with flex is that you’ll break the difficulty. Some fights will inevitably be easier with more or less people than 20, forcing any guild that’s serious about clearing the raid to bring that number (whether it be 15 or 25 people).
i mean, yes, it’s probably true that there are a bunch of people who are in guilds that have only 16 people and who would love to have easy mythic raid bosses. i don’t know if that’s good for the game necessarily.
Something like a small 18-22 (doesn’t have to be that, just an example) I think would do wonders for the “bench” issue where you actively have people on the team that don’t play.
You have to recruit 24-25 right now due to turnover and absences so every single raid people are showing up and told to not play.
A small flex, for better tuning than 10-30, can let guilds recruit to 22 and if everyone shows up great everyone plays. If up to 4 people miss (role dependent of course) they still get to play.
Making the lockout loot based instead of raid ID and cross realm would also go a long way to having someone bring their alt if needed or pugging 1 person for some pulls and practice so nobody is sacrificing their lockout.
Even with some absences you can raid and still get pulls in, practice early phases, even if it doesn’t lead to a kill.
The modern game being so restrictive is crazy to me at this point. People literally pug 0.1% titles (massively more difficult and prestigious than CE) but the idea mythic raid has to be so artificially controlled is crazy.
It kind of works ok in classic because all the content is so easy you just need warm bodies.
A blanket no for “Zomg ‘perfect’ raid tuning” is a joke as the raid gets smacked with nerfs all tier long. Zskarn isn’t even the same fight at all.
Most people can’t make mythic raiding mostly because of schedule or requirements. Sure the roster boss would be easier to deal with flex but flex is not a good idea for any content you want to tune well. Saying that because they nerf bosses that flex should be a thing is not really a thing as they would have to do nerfs anyway because they tune the raid for the world first race and that gearing is not an issue anymore for the race which used to nerf raids over time.
Mythic raiding numbers are actually pretty decent, it’s heroic raiding that has been crashing and that needs a solution. Crossrealm could be a thing, but we have crossrealm after a couple months. Crossrealm would probably be an easy solution that they could implement easily if we feel mythic raiding needs some help, which I do not think it currently does. I would probably like crossrealm guilds before full crossrealm mythic as that would seem more logical in a way.
The problem is even for a small flex, there will always be a BiS size for every fight due to mechanic break points (or lack thereof). Do extra debuffs / soaks happen for 22 people than for 18? If they don’t, you’ll bring 22 for the smaller error margin if someone dies. If there is a crossover point then you’ll bring the raid size right under it, whether that’s 18 or 21.
zskarn is a good point, that was clearly a fight design issue.
i’m not convinced on the others. is the purpose of the ongoing raid nerfs to actually fix tuning issues? aside from some outliers, i don’t think that’s true. i think it’s mostly “blizzard has decided not enough people are clearing this encounter”. expecting anything else to happen suggests they can somehow predict, months in advance, exactly the right tuning for every mechanic on every encounter to let just the expected X guilds clear without any further adjustment needed – i don’t think that’s realistic.
Mythic pugs are not fun for a variety of reasons. One of the big ones is the lockout style, meaning that if someone bails after one wipe on the second boss, you’re unlikely to get a replacement, since that would cost them a boss kill and a chance at a vault.
My current guild started in a similar situation that you’re in last expansion. We got our first CE as a guild last tier. It’s incredibly fulfilling, but so, so much effort (both inside and more outside of raid).
I think this is the precise reason, yes.
This has been the case for hard heroic bosses for so long as flex raiding has existed. I think it’s just less problematic in heroic, since there is less of a competition surrounding it. If you get AOTC two weeks after someone else, nobody really cares. But if you miss CE because some other guilds killed a fight with half as many people, that’s much less fun.
Think about a fight like mythic echo of neltharian and volcanic heart. If it still goes on 5 people every time, and you have 10 in your group, your uptime is going to be abysmal, and it’s going to be a lot harder to kill the boss. But if it goes on fewer people because you have fewer in your group, well now the raid has WAY more room to work with that’s safe, and the entire mechanic becomes, by comparison to the current iteration, trivial. This is just one example from this tier, and I can think of others (even others on this same boss).
In either case, flex raiding causes significant problems for some groups, which really means the content isn’t flexible at all, unfortunately. I don’t see a solution to things like this–it’s not just a matter of scaling health and damage. It’s always mechanics like this that mess up flex raiding. Those mechanics tend to be more forgiving in heroic, though, making it a less substantial problem.
But yeah, as GM of a CE guild for 8 years now, Mythic should scale in size up to 30, and if they want to go down to 15 or even 10 (if possible) that would be good, too.
Fights WILL be harder at the lower end of the pool, because you’ll have fewer people to do jobs. But it’s better than not letting people play at all.
And flex isn’t about letting new people raid who can’t get 20.
Flex Mythic is mostly about guilds that are ALREADY doing Mythic, which requires way more than 20 players, and have to regularly tell people every night “you don’t get to play”.
Telling somebody “you don’t get to play” is the worst thing in WoW.
You could call it hubris from the devs, they don’t want the world first race to clear the raid in 1 week so they overtune the bosses early on. Always felt like a waste of time from my point of view. But I still think that scaling has a lot of issues, all scaled content has never really managed to hit that sweet spot that even nerfed mythic raiding hit. There could be some accommodation made like scaling it from 20 to 25 but I feel letting people flex it like heroic raiding would be pretty bad.
Because you’re making the roster boss even harder in some cases. If you could cut 50 pulls off a 150 pull boss by bringing 22 people instead of 20, no one in their right mind will bring 20. So now mythic guilds will need 26-27 person roster instead of 24-25. Whatever the max flex size is, mythic raid guilds will have to recruit that size +3-4.
Then you have no idea what you’re talking about. Given the difficulties already there in terms of finding like-minded people who mesh well with your team, NOBODY is going to go through additional hell to get even more players just because some non-Mythic bozo on general discussion posted that a fight is easier with 22 than 24.
Both DF raids were cleared the first week (I think? Or right after reset?) so maybe they are backing down on it after the disaster that was SotFO tuning.
I do think mythic flex would need to be smaller and not the full 10-30.
Zskarn was an atrociously designed fight that was fully exploited in a super degenerate way. They didn’t “nerf” Zskarn, they redesigned the fight to patch out the cheese strat everyone was using to trivialize the encounter. It’s harder after the change because you can’t do the cheese strat anymore.
I think that the periodic nerfs that Blizz does to mythic isn’t because they think “gee, this is too hard.” It’s more to keep people playing when they might run out of time otherwise. Blizz, I think, has an idea for how many guilds should get CE every tier. If you’re in the absolute top tier of raiding guilds, you want these fights pre-nerf. That’s the fun part. If you’re ranked like 500-1000, those fights might be too difficult on your timeline for completing the raid. But some targeted nerfs make it attainable, and keeping people engaged in the game is good for the game.
Imagine if volcanic heart scaled with group size and you got 7, instead of 5, if you have 30 players in your raid. I don’t think it’s as easy as you’re saying, and I’m not convinced that smaller = harder (it’s often not the case in heroic flex now).